London Six-Power Conference

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The London Six-Power Conference of 1948 brought together an unusual coalition: three former wartime allies and three smaller nations, gathered to decide the future of a country none of them fully trusted yet. The United States, Britain, and France sat alongside the Benelux countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, to answer a question that had paralyzed diplomacy for years. What should be done with the western part of a defeated, divided Germany?

  The answer they worked toward over two sessions in the winter and spring of 1948 would set the course for a new kind of German state. But to understand why six powers were meeting without the fourth victorious nation, you have to go back to a failure. And to understand what made that failure so urgent, you have to look east, to Czechoslovakia, where something had just gone very wrong.

• 2. A Conference Born of Failure

  ›

  On the 15th of December 1947, the foreign ministers of the four nations that had defeated Nazi Germany sat down together. The United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were supposed to resolve what to do with the German question. They left without agreement.

  That breakdown was not just a diplomatic setback. It meant that the four-power framework for governing postwar Germany, the Allied Control Council, was effectively dead on its feet. The western powers had to find another path.

  Then, early in 1948, Communist forces took control of Czechoslovakia. That event changed the atmosphere entirely. The western allies concluded that waiting for Soviet cooperation on Germany was no longer a realistic option. A democratic West Germany needed to be built, and it needed to be built quickly. The Soviet Union was not invited to the London Conference that followed.

• 3. Two Sessions, One Goal

  ›

  The conference ran in two separate sessions. The first opened on the 23rd of February 1948 and closed on the 6th of March. After a break of several weeks, the delegations reconvened on the 20th of April and worked through to the 2nd of June 1948.

  The six participating nations had a shared objective: to lay the groundwork for Germany's re-entry into the international community. The method they chose was a federal and democratic government covering the American, British, and French occupation zones. Three zones that had been administered separately would, through this process, begin to function as a single political entity.

  The conclusions reached across those two sessions became known as the London Recommendations. These were not abstract principles. They were instructions, passed from the western military governors to the German politicians who would have to carry them out.

• 4. The Frankfurt Documents

  ›

  Once the London Recommendations existed, the western military governors in Germany were tasked with translating them into concrete guidance for German leaders. They met with the Minister Presidents of the western German states and handed over a set of directives.

  Because that meeting took place in Frankfurt, the directives were called the Frankfurt Documents. The Minister Presidents were told to convene a constitutional assembly, formally called a Parliamentary Council, whose purpose was to found a free and democratic state.

  The assembled German leaders thus received their mandate not in London but in Frankfurt, from the military governors who held authority over their zones. The Frankfurt Documents became the immediate starting point for what would eventually become a West German constitution.

• 5. Conditions and Constraints

  ›

  The path toward a new German state was not unconditional. The six powers agreed that Germany must not possess weapons of mass destruction or comparable armaments. They also stipulated that the new state could not use military force against the Soviet occupation zone to the east.

  France's participation came with its own set of demands. Paris agreed to the merger of the three western zones only after securing specific arrangements for two territories. The Saarland, a coal-rich region on the French border, was to be financially integrated with France. The Ruhr area, Germany's industrial heartland, was to be placed under international control rather than left solely in German hands.

  Those French conditions reflected a persistent anxiety about German industrial power, an anxiety that had shaped French foreign policy since the end of the First World War. France was not prepared to help rebuild a German state without guarantees that certain economic assets would remain under external oversight.

• 6. Soviet Withdrawal

  ›

  The Soviet Union's exclusion from the London Conference had consequences that extended beyond the conference itself. As a direct result of the London proceedings, the USSR ended its participation in the Allied Control Council, the four-power body that had nominally governed all of postwar Germany.

  That withdrawal was significant. It formalized the split between the western approach and the Soviet approach to the German question. The Allied Control Council had already been failing in practice, but the Soviet exit made the division institutional. A unified four-power Germany was no longer a working assumption for anyone involved. The path from the London Conference and the Frankfurt Documents led, by stages, to the establishment of two separate German states the following year.